The whole future of computing at stake? Sounds like a movie

The whole future of computing at stake? Sounds like a movie

By John Naughton

April 3, 2005, The Observer

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1451089,00.html

[excerpt]

In a high-ceilinged courtroom in Washington last Monday,
seven men and two women sat listening to arguments about
technology. As far as we know, none of them is especially
knowledgeable about technology.

Indeed, one of them disdains even to use a laptop, and writes
his judicial opinions by hand on a yellow legal pad. But
these are the highest judges in the US, and they are deciding
the future of computing and possibly of the internet itself.

This may seem a grandiose claim, but bear with me. The
Supreme Court was hearing arguments about MGM vs Grokster, a
case which movie studios and other content owners had brought
against Grokster, a file-sharing service, on the grounds that
it enabled copyright infringement by allowing users to
exchange music files freely over the internet.

Grokster's defence was that it provided an efficient
technology for sharing files and could not be held
responsible if users employed it for illicit purposes - in
other words, that its file-sharing technology had substantial
'non-infringing' uses.

This phrase echoes the nub of a landmark precedent set 20
years ago by the Supreme Court in the famous 'Sony- Betamax'
case, which held that Sony was not liable for any copyright
abuses likely to be perpetrated by owners of video-cassette
recorders because there were 'substantial non-infringing'
uses of the product. Or, to put it another way, just because
the VCR could be used for perfectly legitimate purposes -
like viewing a rented movie - it was OK for Sony to sell it,
even if some rogues were going to use it to record
copyrighted TV programmes.

The core of the Grokster defence rests on this 20-year- old
decision - made by a hair's breadth majority of one - and is
supported by a range of briefs filed by technology experts.
They argue that the 'Peer-to-peer' (P2P) networking
technology (of which the Grokster system is a particular
type) is a vital technology for a networked world.